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Comment by 2bluesc | Hacker News Reader

They effectively KabyLake'd it. They released a slightly better (5% quoted from Anandtech article) for the sake of a seasonal/yearly release cycle. Vega is supposed to be the big fish.

The only upside from this from my point of view (a recent RX 470 owner on Arch) is that Linux drivers are likely very close to "just working". Currently somethings have just made their way in to the kernel (Audio bitstreaming, 4.11 I think, and I think I saw it first hand I was running the 4.11 release candidate a few days ago) and soon FreeSync (FWIW) and HDCP are coming soon.

Upside: No proprietary kernel blobs. I applaud AMD on this front and it completely motivated my purchasing decision of my RX 470 (vs nVidia 1060).

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Well, for me it looks good: market price is $20 less than RX480 [1] (or 10% lower) for 7% more performance. Near silent operation and 7% more power draw at full load (less power draw at idle and video playback).

It is as if Kabylake was cheaper than Skylake.

[1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681412...

> They effectively KabyLake'd it. They released a slightly better (5% quoted from Anandtech article) for the sake of a seasonal/yearly release cycle.

No, it's the same chip, just different clocks. This is nothing new or out of the ordinary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140412

The new chips are on a 14nm process. They might have a similar architecture but there's room for higher clock speeds according to AMD. Ars Technica said they expect partner cards to have higher performance than the reference numbers AMD gave out.

The 480 was 14nm as well. It's literally the exact same thing, same process. New default clock/voltage, new model number. The process did improve over time, sure, but a late 480 is pretty much the same as a 580.

Oh, I misread. They said it's an improved process, but I guess it's at the same node as the last one.

A process can be drastically better while being on the same node - e.g adding FinFet or other technologies. Meanwhile everyone uses different measures of node size such that they're not comparable across fabs and are kind of marketing numbers these days.

what about power consumption and noise?

They have been doing for ever. Remember the R9 280 and the 280X? What's the difference between the 280X and the 7970?

I have a gtx 1070 and a gtx 1060 system and things "just work". On linux I have bluray playback, various older games on steam, random webGL games or demos, various desktop effects (standard unity).

Do things like that work with the AMD? Do the AMD drivers still have issues with playback? Or leaving yourself logged into for a week with 100 windows that triggers a mem leak so that all new windows are a black rectangle? Pixel corruption? Performance worse than a 3 generation old nvidia?

I have a 1070 and Chrome crashes all the time watching streams/youtube, got flickering on windows when running a 144hz monitor

I have a drawing error with tooltips occasionally, and 4k video could play more smoothly, but apart from that, AMDGPU is working great.

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